Around The Tea-Table eBook

CHAPTER I.

Thetable-clothisspread.

Our theory has always been, “Eat lightly in
the evening.” While, therefore, morning
and noon there is bountifulness, we do not have much
on our tea-table but dishes and talk. The most
of the world’s work ought to be finished by
six o’clock p.m. The children are home from
school. The wife is done mending or shopping.
The merchant has got through with dry-goods or hardware.
Let the ring of the tea-bell be sharp and musical.
Walk into the room fragrant with Oolong or Young Hyson.
Seat yourself at the tea-table wide enough apart to
have room to take out your pocket-handkerchief if
you want to cry at any pitiful story of the day, or
to spread yourself in laughter if some one propound
an irresistible conundrum.

The bottle rules the sensual world, but the tea-cup
is queen in all the fair dominions. Once this
leaf was very rare, and fifty dollars a pound; and
when the East India Company made a present to the king
of two pounds and two ounces, it was considered worth
a mark in history. But now Uncle Sam and his
wife every year pour thirty million pounds of it into
their saucers. Twelve hundred years ago, a Chinese
scholar by the name of Lo Yu wrote of tea, “It
tempers the spirits and harmonizes the mind, dispels
lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and
prevents drowsiness, lightens and refreshes the body,
and clears the perceptive faculties.” Our
own observation is that there is nothing that so loosens
the hinge of the tongue, soothes the temper, exhilarates
the diaphragm, kindles sociality and makes the future
promising. Like one of the small glasses in the
wall of Barnum’s old museum, through which you
could see cities and mountains bathed in sunshine,
so, as you drink from the tea-cup, and get on toward
the bottom so that it is sufficiently elevated, you
can see almost anything glorious that you want to.
We had a great-aunt who used to come from town with
the pockets of her bombazine dress standing way out
with nice things for the children, but she would come
in looking black as a thunder cloud until she had
got through with her first cup of tea, when she would
empty her right pocket of sugarplums, and having finished
her second cup would empty the other pocket, and after
she had taken an extra third cup, because she felt
so very chilly, it took all the sitting-room and parlor
and kitchen to contain her exhilaration.

Be not surprised if, after your friends are seated
at the table, the style of the conversation depends
very much on the kind of tea that the housewife pours
for the guests. If it be genuine Young Hyson,
the leaves of which are gathered early in the season,
the talk will be fresh, and spirited, and sunshiny.
If it be what the Chinese call Pearl tea, but our merchants
have named Gunpowder, the conversation will be explosive,
and somebody’s reputation will be killed before